( Poem #196) In the desert In the desert
I saw a creature, naked, bestial,
Who, squatting upon the ground,
Held his heart in his hands,
And ate of it.
I said: "Is it good, friend?"
"It is bitter-bitter," he answered;
"But I like it
Because it is bitter,
And because it is my heart."
-- Stephen Crane |
There are a number of persistent themes that run through Crane's poems.
Among the most noticeable are human nature, love and the exploration of
man's relations to God, religion, truth, and nature, mostly with a strong
undercurrent of irony. Whatever he is writing about, though, there is one
feature common to nearly every poem - it makes the reader *think*.
Crane is a master of the paradigm shift, the few words that suddenly twist
the reader's world view around, exposing paradox and uncertainty where
before was only smooth complacency. 'Zen' is a badly overused word, and I
won't pretend to know what it properly means, but Crane certainly fits the
public perception of what Zen should be - thought provoking, leaving no
assumption unchallenged, and with multiple meanings and dichotomies
coexisting in every piece.
A final note - the piece above is an excerpt from a larger work, 'The Black
Riders and Other Lines'. Like Fitzgerald's Rubaiyat, it is a series of
somewhat disconnected short pieces, but, again like the Rubaiyat, the pieces
take on a whole new dimension when read together - not necessarily as a
larger 'whole', but simply because each piece develops and reinforces the
themes, the images and the atmosphere of all the rest. A link to the
complete text of the Black Riders is included below.
Note: The poem was untitled, being merely verse III of The Black Riders; I
merely used the first line as a title.
Biography:
Crane, Stephen
b. Nov. 1, 1871, Newark, N.J., U.S.
d. June 5, 1900, Badenweiler, Baden, Ger.
American novelist, poet, and short-story writer, best known for his
novels Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893) and The Red Badge of
Courage (1895) and the short stories "The Open Boat," "The Bride Comes
to Yellow Sky," and "The Blue Hotel."
For a complete biography see <http://www.rdlthai.com/ellsa_cranebio.html>
Assessment:
After The Red Badge of Courage, Crane's few attempts at
the novel were of small importance, but he achieved an extraordinary
mastery of the short story.
[...]
In the best of these tales Crane showed a rare ability to shape colourful
settings, dramatic action, and perceptive characterization into ironic
explorations of human nature and destiny. In even briefer scope,
rhymeless, cadenced and "free" in form, his unique, flashing poetry was
extended into War Is Kind (1899).
Stephen Crane first broke new ground in Maggie, which evinced an
uncompromising (then considered sordid) realism that initiated the
literary trend of the succeeding generations--i.e., the sociological
novels of Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, and James T. Farrell. Crane
intended The Red Badge of Courage to be "a psychological portrayal of
fear," and reviewers rightly praised its psychological realism. The first
nonromantic novel of the Civil War to attain widespread popularity, The
Red Badge of Courage turned the tide of the prevailing convention about
war fiction and established a new, if not unprecedented, one. The secret
of Crane's success as war correspondent, journalist, novelist,
short-story writer, and poet lay in his achieving tensions between irony
and pity, illusion and reality, or the double mood of hope contradicted
by despair. Crane was a great stylist and a master of the contradictory
effect.
-- EB
Links:
Complete text of 'The Black Riders and Other Lines' can be found at the
Poets' Corner, <[broken link] http://geocities.com/~spanoudi/poems/crane02.html>.
There's also a nice paragraph on why Crane is poetry, though, quoting
from the site,
"Crane himself declined to call them poems, referring to them
only as 'lines'."
There's a Crane site at
<[broken link] http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/~mmaynard/Crane/crane.html>
and a nice biographical snippet at
<[broken link] http://www.spanam.simplenet.com/crane.htm>
m.
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